Competent and good are not synonyms. Smart and good are not synonyms. Evil and competent are not synonyms. Virtues are not all moral virtues. Bravery is a morally neutral virtue. It makes bad people worse, and good people better and without it all virtues and vices are nearly meaningless. Competence is morally neutral. It is […]

Stephen Colbert recaps the Acela primaries and whispers a prayer to God to keep Trump off of small planes until November.

I can’t wait to see how he covers the Cruz-Fiorina disaster.

The only think that is crazier than the great unravelling of the right is that people are actually planning to vote for Trump this fall and may completely miss just how good Hillary is compared to everyone else this year. That’s truly insane. It’s insane that after all her experience, preparation, knowledge, commitment, leadership ability and energy, she has to face this guy who can’t adjust his self-tanner who thinks he can sail into the White House by putting down everyone’s mothers, sisters and daughters.

Stranger things have happened, I guess. Susan Sarandon is probably secretly a Republican. But sometimes I wonder if Donald Trump is secretly a Clintonista.

24 Responses

My plan is to completely ignore Trump I place no value on anything he says or dose. Hillary Clinton is the candidate I support and who will receive my vote if on the ballot in Nov.. My biggest concern, and something I’ve been picking up on for awhile now, is exactly what John Boehner expressed yesterday about Hillary’s nomination…

Boehner called her accomplished and smart.

He predicted, however, that if Clinton’s email scandal escalates, a surprise could come out of the Democratic race.

“Don’t be shocked … if two weeks before the convention, here comes Joe Biden parachuting in and Barack Obama fanning the flames to make it all happen,” Boehner said.

Sorry to say but thinking how this could continue to play out (think huff post Obama articles the day after Clinton won Ohio) it would be a really hard hard thing to stop. Cant help it, after the 2008 primary I have no faith in the integrity of the party. And to me, it fits the profile of the current party leader, it is all about me always. Hoping Im wrong.

What Boehner is saying is what the GOP has been shopping for a long time and that since the GOP is looking to take the nomination away from Trump they are trying to make the same thing happen on the Dem side. They project all their problems onto us so to speak.

That being said after 2008 I understand where you are coming from on this.

Yes, true but, as RD states in her newest post ….Democrats and journalists are going to have to rally around Hillary….and now. I’m looking for the party bosses to get out there, with their pompoms, for Hillary just as the late Ted Kennedy and outraged party consultants did in Jan 2008 for Obama. Certainly it is time that the BS Inevitability-moody stall rants we hear from the Biden-Duval crowd be attacked and vigorously by fellow Dems. But I’m not hearing that happening and yes I believe its well past time we did.
Need a good example this week Mr. Biden Quote, ‘he’ll [Biden] take Mr. Sanders’s aspirational approach over Mrs. Clinton’s caution any day. Quote, ‘I like the idea of saying we can do much more because we can, .’ I quote, ‘I don’t think any democrat ever won saying,’ quote, ‘we can’t think that big we ought to really downsize here because it’s not realistic, he said in a mocking tone.’” ….wondering if he was wagging his finger while he was scolding, Mrs. Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee of his Party. Jeeez.

If the DemParty makes a last minute switcheroo . . . Biden in/ Clinton out . . . . I very much doubt I could see myself voting for Biden. Biden’s son is invested in a company which hopes to do fracking for gas and oil all over East Ukraine. That would explain Biden’s support for the illegal neo-nazi Coup Regime currently occupationizing Kiev and trying to conquer East Ukraine and reduce it to obedience.

So if a Biden-for-Clinton switcheroo is the possibility you may silently be alluding to, I can only say “no thanks on the Biden.”

Ohhhhh, @tdraicer, you so seeeley🙂. Honey, did you really think that there are ‘puppet masters’? Did you take all that literally? I mean, really, if I were to take you literally, I would say that you are being obtuse. But I’ll give you some credit and say that I don’t think that you really are an idiot – you just pretend to be one on the internet.

Before I address ‘the talk’, let me clarify that I’m not some doe-eyed undergrad who has bought into Bernie Sanders’ silly rhetoric of revolution. I’m an adult. As a young man I worked in the construction trades, served as an enlisted man in the United States Army Signal Corps, done hard time in the state penitentiary for robbery, been homeless and slept in the gutter, and worse. For the last 30 years I’ve been a software developer and network engineer and owned an IT consultancy for the last twenty years. I’ve been poor – beans and cool-aid for supper, poor. Lived in the deepest inner-city ghetto. Had my head busted open at least twice.

I’ve thrived through the stagflation of the late 70s, and if there were recessions in the early 80s, 90’s and 00s, I didn’t notice. The last one was brutal. I lost it all. But I’ve recovered – that’s what serial entrepreneurs do. I’m financially better off that I’ve ever been in my life. My prospects look to be unlimited. And unlike the publisher of this site, I wasn’t a whining, insufferable victim-ass little bitc…, uh, cun.., er, puss…, ok, how about pantywaist, for all on this blog to see.

Now, as to ‘The Talk’. It’s not really a thing. Paddy Chayefsky is a playwright. If he was to offer a literal explanation of ‘The Talk’ it would take way more than two hours, and it would be more like a lecture by Noam Chomsky. Now I loves me some Chomsky as much as the next guy – he’s an engaging lecturer and his talks are interesting and informative, but it doesn’t make for compelling drama. George Carlin was a comedian, and, in my opinion, a philosopher of sorts. He uses his skills to point out our folly and hypocrisy and to make the most unpleasant of truths palatable. His bit wasn’t meant to be taken literally – it’s a… JOKE! Get it? Apparently, you didn’t.

There are no puppet masters, @jdracier. No Men in Black from secret government agencies who sit POTUS down for a briefing. If Sanders were to be elected, he would get the word in many ways that there is not going to be any damned ‘revolution’. Likewise, When Hillzilla is enthroned, she won’t have to get the word in any way from anyone. She knows the drill. She already knows that her brand of Kissingerian realpolitik is owner-approved. Why, it’s just the ticket!

So, Ms/Mr Racier, I shan’t deign to discuss FDR or LBJ with you except to say that I’m a big fan of their work. Well, all of it except the picking of targets over breakfast. And if any of these kids are taking Bernie’s talk of revolution seriously, they’re being as dense as you are, or are pretending to be – hard to tell over the internet. Real revolution is bloody. People die. Governments fall. ‘Murica was almost at that point about eighty years ago. And we will, WILL, be there again. Mark my words.

And you, RD… I’m not predicting the end of the world. If I did, it would be in ~five billion years when the sun expands and cooks it. What will, WILL, happen is that there will be unimaginably severe hardship and social disruption caused by global fucking warming – DoD has war-gamed it out, and those guys Do. Not. Play. There WILL be a tipping point. When it will occur and how sever the consequences aren’t quite known, but you and yours will incur a few more turns of the wheel of death and rebirth if you were selfish enough to have brought children into this world. There have been five mass extinctions. The sixth is happening now. First comes the CO2, then the rise in temperatures. Then comes the super-massive release of other heat trapping gasses – methane, hydrogen sulfide. What is frightening is that the models don’t hold up for too long. It’s happening now. There’s no comfort in hoping that we’ll all be gone before it happens because it very well may happen before we are dead or dementia sets in and we don’t know what’s going on. I, however, can take some solace in the knowledge that the kids I never had are the luckiest kids that don’t exist.

Trump is the ultimate result of the devolution of the judgmental intelligence of the American voter, which never was too great at any point, but now has apparently been atrophied further by the bombardment of the “entertainment at all costs” media. Trump has no more knowledge of how anything works in government or world affairs than the stereotypical guy in the bar at 2am. It is an absolute embarrassment to even think about his narcissistic and belligerent rantings. We have Hillary Clinton, who knows more about the world and the nuances of policy than almost anyone ever, and then we have Trump with his six-year old’s views about “we need to have the greatest military in the world, and then no one will bother us,” “we need to have really good business people negotiating with other countries, and then they won’t take advantage of us any more,” “I will create great jobs for everyone, you’ll see.”

But then again, we now have Republicans so eager to win at any cost, that they are are falling in behind Trump, who is really reminiscent of those fascist bully boys who took over much of Europe in the last century. Yesterday, I saw Senator Corker, head of the Foreign Relations Committee, say that he was fairly impressed with “Trump’s ideas” on foreign policy. David Gergen, the “eminence grise” of the Republicans, who somehow always ends up, after what appears to be careful reflection, to support any Republican candidate, said that it was good to have Trump filling in his views on global issues. The truth is of course that Trump wrote none of that speech. and that nothing he sas makes any sense at all,in reality. And yet here he is, apparently one step away from the presidency. And all that stands in his way, is Hillary, whom the media scorns and carps at, and looks at askance.

America has always had a strong strain of anti-intellectualism, and it shows up again here. Being really smart is viewed with suspicion, resented, or seen as over analysis reflecting weakness. We have always admired the “strong” person, from the Westerns or the war movies, or the “captains of industry” propaganda. People who have learned to be angry, frustrated, impotent, latch on to a “strongman,” who promises to fix things by decisive action. Perot was winning in the polls for a time. America, at least some of it, has been asking for this kind of snake oil salesman for quite a while. FDR thought that Huey Long was one of the two most dangerous men in America. The Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh almost ran for president, and in a truly terrifying Philip Roth novel of alternative history, actually won. It can happen here. We have to do everything we can to prevent it.

Lecturing Stormtrumpers on how stupid they are is no way to convince any of them to change their mind about anything. If you have already written them all off, then “changing their minds” would not concern you, I suppose.

In which case, the Trump campaign will be an interesting political-research excercise in discovering just how many Trump voters there are.

Gosh, Josef, I must be such a Pacled. You know German and I bet you know English too. I wish I knew two languages. If I knew two languages I would be smart. I would have power. I wish I were smart like you. Then I would have power.

But I’m not smart. I’m dumm. I only know one language, even though I knows it real good.

Body: Last week I went down to Washington, D.C. to deliver a paper at a conference in the technical field where I worked, ten years or so and two or three careers ago, before the dot.com trash. The trip was solely an exercise in merit-making, since I doubt very much I'll get work in the field, but reconnecting with old friends was really great -- even […]

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